Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and author Sid Griffin is a founder member of the Los Angeles band The Long Ryders and bluegrass band The Coal Porters. Alongside his studio output with those bands, he has recorded several solo albums and is the author of four books. Like many of their peers, The Long Ryders' album sales in no way reflect their significance in the alternative country music chain or their influence on numerous acts that followed their path of melodic guitar-driven songs. A statement of their status and esteem in the industry was the Country Music Hall of Fame including them in an exhibition titled WESTERN EDGE: THE ROOTS and REVERBERATIONS of LOS ANGELES COUNTRY ROCK in 2022. After a three-decade recording hiatus, they returned to the studio to record PSYCHEDELIC COUNTRY SOUL in 2019. They followed it four years later with SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER, both albums equalling the high quality of their earlier work. Griffin is about to embark on a tour of the U.K. and Ireland with his longtime friend Peter Case before heading out on the road with The Long Ryders later in the year. Lonesome Highway found him typically enthusiastic when we recently spoke with him at his London home.
When we last spoke with you eight years ago, you were unsure if The Long Ryders would record again. Since then, you have recorded PSYCHEDELIC COUNTRY SOUL and SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER despite the logistical complications of where you all live and the pandemic.
I didn't think The Long Ryders would play again after seventeen and a half years, but we got some offers from America, and the next time I knew it, we were back in the game; I didn't dream that would happen. We were going to do a 80s oldies show, but I didn't want to play Run Dusty Run or the same songs anymore. One of my good friends, Barry Shank, wrote a brilliant song called Ivory Tower, which is on the fabulous NATIVE SONS Box Set, but I had played that song hundreds of times, including rehearsals. We thought we really needed some new songs, and that's how we got into that. I was actually the last to succumb, Greg (Sowders) and Steven (McCarthy) were up for it. Now, at our shows, the set list is half and half old and new, and I can do songs like Ivory Tower. I realised that I had to have new songs on those first few reunion tours.
How long did those albums take to record?
Those albums were literally made in a number of days. Three days doing the backing tracks and then we sang and did some overdubs, Ed (Stasium) mixed them and sent them to us. The Rolling Stones want to get one track each day done, so if they come up with a Brown Sugar backing track in one whole day, they'll all be happy. I was listening to The Beatles when they toured from 1962 to 1965, and those live shows were amazing. What went down on tape was not repaired or edited. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sing on key, and Ringo finds the groove every time. It's incredible; they never speed up, and they never slow down. The Long Ryders had a similar understanding in the way that The Beatles incubated so well from playing in Hamburg.
That adeptness must be beneficial when you tour, given you all living so far from one another.
It does. We don't have to rehearse a lot. Stephen, Greg and I have been playing together for so long, and there is a distinctive and unquestionable groove and tightness that we fall into. Greg literally knows what I want to eat for breakfast. Because of that, I find playing with other people more difficult because the bass player and drummer will have different ideas that I'm not used to.
What age demographic is attending your show, and has your music filtered to a younger audience?
Primarily but not exclusively, seventy per cent male and thirty per cent female, mostly men our age. But the crazy thing about it is we have more kids between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five coming to the shows. It's a really growing demographic out of nowhere, probably because parents are starting to bring their fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds to the shows. With boys, it may be to see Stephen McCarthy play the guitar because he is a virtuoso; he is the country rock answer to Johnny Marr. My daughter, who is twenty-four, brought her friend to see us play in Brighton, and they loved it. So, the next time The Long Ryders were in Brighton, where she is at university, she brought twelve friends, and they had a marvellous time. I thought the young people listening to The Long Ryders would be at the back of the room looking at their phones; they were dancing and jumping around at the front of the room. That's been a joy, but it is primarily guys my age at the shows. My wife once joked, 'If you don't know where Sid's gig is, just follow the grey ponytails.'
Are you experiencing an acceleration in sales for vinyl for your albums at the merch desks and by the Cherry Red label?
Certainly, young kids want vinyl. The CD is not dead yet, but it's on the ground looking up at the ceiling, on its backside, breathing heavily. I don't know how all these different formats can survive: streaming, downloading, vinyl, CD and cassette. There are two or three cassette plants opening in the world right now. CD’s can be a wonderful package, but they're small. When you get a twelve-by-twelve-inch album, it's a proper piece of artwork. Even forgetting about the music, Sgt. Pepper's cover, by Peter Blake and his then-wife, was a piece of art, but when it was released on CD, you're asking, 'Who are all these people?'
With the Americana brand expanding in all directions and losing its identity, do you feel that 'guitar bands' like The Long Ryders are being overlooked?
Because of the information highway and the digital world, we have a multiplicity of radio stations and streaming services. There needs to be a format, and Americana as a format has not taken off in the way that I thought it was going to do about eight years ago. It hasn't done what I thought it would, and we need a new name or format. The industry has taken over what Americana could have been to its detriment. It breaks my heart. I want to see new young bands with an immediate place or genre where they can go, but it's not there. With the streaming service paying such terrible royalties, why make music at all? You'd be a fool to go into it to make money, but you should at least get something back. There is a young band here in the U.K. like Eight Rounds Rapid and artists like Jack Valero, and I think, 'Where are these guys going to go?' We as a culture need a format of radio that has everything from guitar bands, riot girl bands, and pop/rock bands like Sleator-Kinney, Tom Waits, Wilco, and Ry Cooder; all these wonderful people, but they're not on the radio.
Are you as enthusiastic these days about performing live as ever?
I don't know how it happened, but I like playing live more than ever. Jeffrey Lee Pierce from the band The Gun Club was the first person I heard use this funny phrase: 'I do the gigs for free; they're paying me to travel.' I really don't mind travelling, especially with someone like Peter Case, and I like playing live more than ever, and there are not many days off on this tour. I've known Peter for forty-two years, and we did this tour four years ago, just before Covid. I thought we'd be listening to music while driving around in the van during that tour. I think we actually only played any music twice. The rest of the time, we were chin-wagging like two old ladies hanging over the fence or having a morning coffee (what was the club in Sacramento, California, that didn't pay people? What was that girl's name that slapped that guy in the face? Did you hear about the fight one night in Denver? That guy from the band got hit on the head? So, I'm looking forward to the tour as well as the music. Also, many of my friends come to the shows; every other night, someone that I know and love will come to the show.
What can we expect from your shows in Ireland with Peter Case? Will they be diligently prepared?
No. Peter never does the same show twice. I've seen Jerry Lee Lewis play, and before playing a few hits at the end, he would play a completely different set each time. He'd play gospel, country, a Broadway show tune. Peter is a bit like that. I told him that my favourite song of his is Still Playing from 1995, and he said, 'I don't play that any more,' and then one night, he just played it, he's a bit like that. I open up for forty-five minutes, Peter comes on and does his set, and at the end, we do some songs together, which is always the highlight for me. I may have to borrow a banjo for the gigs in Ireland, but I'll have my mandolin, harmonica and six-string acoustic with me. Peter will have his twelve-string guitar, which he plays like Leadbelly. It's hard to do Long Ryder's songs because of their pounding backbeat, but I do some. But if someone yells out 'Ivory Tower or Run Dusty Run,' songs I've done a thousand times, half the time I'll play them because tickets aren't cheap anymore, so if someone yells out incessantly for a song, I'll probably play it.
The Long Ryders will be back on tour in Europe later this year.
Yes, we're on the road in October, playing the U.K. and Europe. We also hope to reprise The Native Sons tour in March 2025 in North America and Central Europe, where we play that album from top to bottom.
The core sound on the recent albums, PSYCHEDELIC COUNTRY SOUL and SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER, is business as usual, but the songwriting reflects the passing years. I couldn't imagine you writing Until God Takes Me Away in 1984 or Join My Gang in 2023.
Good point. I'm a little embarrassed about Join My Gang. It's a nice punchy rock and roll song, but if you listen to what I'm singing, it's baloney. It's a small, skinny Sid Griffin kid trying to sound badass and tough. I'd feel like an idiot singing those lyrics now. I'd also have been embarrassed back then singing Until God Takes Me Away to a woman. Now, with maturity and age, I can sing that song to a woman and not be embarrassed, but when you're in your teens or early twenties, you are embarrassed by that sentiment. Stephen and I do some acoustic shows and we always do that song.
The instrumental Song For Ukraine from SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER represented a political dimension to your music. Given what is going down globally, Is that something you have been drawn towards as a band in recent years?
I don't think we will be doing a Billy Bragg, but we had a stand-alone single that Stephen wrote called Down To The Well, which came out around COVID-19, and we will probably put it in an anthology. It's a great song about Trump, and as you get older, it is time to point out some of these things. People ask me how I enjoy London and one of my answers is that I can't go home to The States now, there could be a civil war, why would I want to bring a wife and two kids to that.
Going back to your early days as one of the pioneering bands in what became the Paisley Underground, do you feel shortchanged that your music did not reach a greater listenership then?
It goes back to what we were saying earlier, there was no radio format at the time. We use Old 97s bass player Murry Hammond on tour. He's a great human being and musician, and they came out ten years after The Long Ryders. He's ten years younger than us, and they had a much easier ride because bands like ourselves and Green On Red, The Blasters, and X had laid down a sort of Americana marker and musical pathway to follow. But none of those bands I mentioned sold too many records. I'm not begrudging Old 97's their success, they're a terrific band and have a great new album out called AMERICAN PRIMITIVE. The best way to sum it up is to quote a prominent U.K. rock critic who said, 'The Long Ryders were the perfectly right band at the perfectly wrong time.'
How do you compare your vocation as a songwriter to that of a biographer?
Songs are bursts of inspiration; sometimes, a three-minute song comes in fifteen minutes, and it's done and finished. I'm working on a book that is kind of an autobiography, and it's taking forever. It's a little different, I skip my early days because no one wants to know about my early days growing up in Kentucky. It is funny or poignant stories about the bands I have been in and some of the famous shoulders I brushed in L.A. I'm extremely proud of it, and I've just finished editing the second pass of the book. I need to edit it because no one wants to read one hundred and thirty thousand words about my life. I've done four books, and they take so much effort than any song or album; a book is like moving a mountain using a small hand shovel.
You mentioned growing up in Kentucky. What music was around you at that time?
A lot of country and western, and a lot of bluegrass. In the U.K., Ireland, and continental Europe, there's usually a tavern nearby where some act is playing music informally. I go to a bluegrass session on Tuesday nights here in London because it's at a nearby pub. Back when I was growing up, there was a tavern called Bowers; it's gone now, but it was there from 1876; a German/American family owned it. They had a band there in the early1960s, four or five guys with a banjo, a stand-up bass and a fiddle. In the summer, they would have the windows open, and when I was a kid, I could see through the window and hear them playing. As a kid, to me, they looked like old men. One day, coming home from college, I went into the bar, and there were lads not much older than me playing, and I realised that back in Kentucky, these bluegrass bands doing Ernest Tubb and Bill Monroe songs were guys in their mid-to-late twenties.
Did you reject that music at the time because you thought it wasn't hip?
Yes, I thought it was interesting but kind of stupid, hillbilly and hick. Right in my neighbourhood were these virtuoso musicians, fiddle and guitar players, but I didn't care at the time. Like a lot of young people, I had an infatuation with The Who, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It's funny because my sister and I were huge Motown fans. We had more records, singles and albums by The Supremes, The Four Tops and The Temptations, but it never occurred to me to be a soulful Motown R'n'B musician.
Finally, I want your opinion on A.I. in the music industry. Does it worry you?
It does. A lot of people in the Orient make fake Beatles songs and post them on Instagram. They may superficially sound like The Beatles, but when you listen closely, they're more like The Rutles or a parody of The Beatles. But it is worrying. If they can do that to The Beatles, can they do it to James Joyce or Patrick Kavanagh or get some still photographs of Marilyn Monroe and imitate her voice for videos? It's scary.
Interview by Declan Culliton Photograph by Phil Grey